The King and I: on the writer-reader's reunion with his childhood boogeyman

I read the bulk of my Stephen King in those wonder years before my teens, the same period during which I collected comic books and gorged on horror movies that approximately 70% sucked. I was attracted, like most people I suppose, to the promise of something morbid, traumatic or fantastic, maybe all three. But, surprisingly, I stayed for the realism. So often with those King novels, once the mechanics of their supernatural conceits began to fully reveal themselves in all their half-baked stratagems, my interest in the undead pets or the car from hell or the apocalyptic battle royale would rapidly begin to drain away. King seemed to be this knack for taking something that seemed best shrouded in mystery and dragging it out into the light where he could overwork it at length. Yet there was something in King’s portraits of lower to middle class life in small to medium sized communities, of ordinary disappointments and frustrations with marriage and kids, health problems or booze problems, with jobs or school, that kept me caring, wondering, reading. They probably taught me something. They were greasy kid’s stuff, but they were about real adults.

I’ve rarely returned to King since. I got rid of a lot of them. My tastes just went in a very, very different direction. But every once in a while, like a whisper from some unseen entity, they call me back. I saw King give a speech last year at a festival in Toronto where he was warmly introduced by no less a heavyweight than Margaret Atwood. King was lively, bright, articulate, unpretentious as always, and totally hilarious. I forgot how funny he could be. He told a story about AC/DC and hip-hop I still repeat to friends, though without the same finesse. And I forgot how frequently he was still cranking out books, some of which were actually supposed to be good, maybe even his best. So I finally got around to it, not to revisiting King, but rather catching up with him.

Just After Sunset (Scribner, $32) is King’s latest collection of stories. Seemed like a good place to get reacquainted. I remembered how much I once loved some of the stories in Skeleton Crew, ‘Nona’ and ‘The Mist,’ or in Night Shift, ‘Grey Matter’ and ‘I Know What you Need.’ What the man could do with forbidding weather and stale beer! But I forgot however how wildly King can over-write. It all came hurtling back to me with brain-piercing clarity as I trudged through ‘The Gingerbread Girl,’ the first, soppier half of which reads like late Michener, the last half of which finds our heroine duct-taped to a chair and being chased by a one-dimensional psycho killer for what feels like an eternity. “You’re making me mad, Lady Jane!” says psycho. “No, you were already mad. As in hatter,” parries woman-in-peril, if only in her mind. At least she knows when a line stinks too bad to be spoken aloud.

Thing is, when you’re Stephen King, you pretty much publish whatever the hell you want, and if you squeezed it out on a whim but still deem it fit for print it’s hardly like some idiot editor’s going to suggest you do some trimming or even, you know, reject the story. What, do they not like money? Or readers? (‘The Gingerbread Girl’ was first published in Esquire, if you were curious.) Fortunately, for those readers patiently working through Just After Sunset, the lesser tales are fairly easy to identify in the first pages, and the better ones, it turns out, occur with greater frequency.

Logorrhea’s a funny thing. It can make fiction an endless plod through a blizzard in a T-shirt or a warm bath after a glass of wine, depending on what lies beneath the flow of words. So while I’d argue that one of Just After Sunset’s briefest stories is in fact one of its finest and most eloquent—the seven-page, crisply rendered and richly imagistic ‘Graduation Afternoon,’ in which a young woman on the cusp of adulthood finds the fleeting nature of youth reflected in an actual apocalypse—I’d still have to concede that some of the longer, more rambling stories possess an immersive quality that can arise only when the author’s allowed to luxuriate a while in his creation. I think especially of ‘N.’ In this longer story, composed of letters and transcripts, we’re gradually ushered into the apparent psychosis of an accountant suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder after visiting a hidden field that, by his own accounts, refuses to be photographed. The layering of and emphasis on counting works wonders—the accountant counts compulsively, he carefully recounts his story—while the sense of voice lulls us as it chills us, drawing us in in the tradition of some of the best 19th century tales of psychological collapse.

There’s also ‘Stationary Bike,’ another excellent description of the strange, troubling little items that can manifest and accumulate in private. After visiting a doctor who warns against obesity, a commercial artist buys a stationary bike that he rides in the basement of his apartment building while staring at a mural of a landscape he’s painted on the wall. He feels as though he's literally riding into the landscape. He buys maps... What’s most compelling is the way King makes his protagonist so down to earth and unreflective. He starts to work on strange paintings in his spare time without knowing why, and before we know it King himself is engaging in a process that’s probably hard for reader or writer to be entirely aware of as it unfolds. He’s making life on the page feel comfortably everyday before slowly allowing some corner of the frame to reveal a flaw and infect the story’s life-image as a whole. It’s a considerable gift for any author to possess, and for all his occasional indulgences, sentimentalizing or unwillingness to accept a dumb, sub-pulpy idea as just dumb sub-pulp, King seems to have this gift locked into his DNA. And I’d wager a guess that it’s this very quality that bridges the gaps between so many readers of all walks of life, and keeps calling us back.

Devil in the details: Margaret Atwood's Payback

Margaret Atwood is nothing if not an irreverent polemicist. In the final days of a federal election so abysmally superfluous, inconsequential and lacking in dynamic options that fewer Canadians bothered to vote than during any previous election in history, Atwood announced her advocacy for the Bloq Québécois, a party that, besides not actually appearing on the ballots of the vast majority of the country’s ridings, including Atwood’s, is fundamentally committed to removing the entire province of Quebec from Canada. The point? At least they gave a shit about the arts.

To be sure, as complimented by her intelligence, curiosity and wit, Atwood’s irreverence is something to be grateful for. Her sounding off on whatever is a welcome element in the national discourse, her particular irreverence speaking to a healthy skepticism not only on the author’s part but also on that of her readers, who are encouraged to consider the merits of each of Atwood’s arguments and arrive at their own conclusion. This is especially the case with the eerily well-timed Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (House of Anansi, $18.95), Atwood’s contribution to the CBC Massey Lecture Series. It is a relatively slim volume, jam-packed with facts, proposals and surprising, insightful connections between extant myths and notions on its central topic. But if it’s final chapter feels a bit slight after all the hearty build-up, I think it’s mainly because the ball has finally been tossed in our court. It is difficult to look at a ball just sitting there, inert and waiting to be picked up.

Payback goes way back. In searching for the origins of debt, of balances and exchanges, Atwood ultimately suggests that it may be primal, citing experiments on monkeys that reveal innate tendencies resembling credit and trade negotiations. With an inevitable emphasis on literary sources however—Atwood is above all a novelist and poet, and she’s ever mindful of the practical uses of literature—she gets the best mileage out of the Devil and the myriad Fausts who’ve accepted his always popular buy-now, pay-later schemes over the years. Mephistopheles has a knack for bookkeeping, it would seem, and a dependence on the sort of binding legalities that’s been mystified everyone from illiterate farmers suffering a bad yield to gambling addicts on the lam to ordinary homebuyers from time immemorial. Debt requires an account, which is to say a narrative, and the accumulation of debt, Atwood posits, is so precariously seductive because it helps give our lives a story. Debt is drama. We are what we owe, and our stories are sometimes defined by the settling and unsettling of accounts. The great body of 19th century Western literature, as Atwood smartly observes, was always very much concerned with money and class, and in a memorable survey of some of its most famous protagonists Atwood declares that Emma Bovary in the end wasn’t punished for sex but “shopaholicism.”

It’s important to note that in exploring the idea of debt in stories, ones often featuring transactions involving spiritual, supernatural or in any case non-monetary properties, money itself is never the real issue. Currency, as the “current” part of that word implies, is fluid and merely representational. Considerations of what items we place fundamental value on are thus duly approached, especially in the final, most problematic chapter, which finds a modern-day Ebenezer Scrooge realizing how closely his fortunes, both literal and figurative, are dependent on the dictates of environmental devastation. But Atwood’s engagement with the more shaded characteristics of debt collectors and their clients reaches its most satisfying depths in her analysis of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, which takes into account religious and ethnic differences—Antonio, she points out, didn’t charge interest on his loans not because he was a good guy but because as a Christian interest was actually outlawed at the time—and views Antonio and Shylock as uncomfortably codependent in the development of their own stories. Antonio “has projected onto Shylock—as his Shadow—the malice and the greediness that he himself possesses but can’t acknowledge. He’s made Shylock his whipping boy.” It’s a major highlight.

Looming over Payback is the question of debt as sin, and who of the two parties it requires is the more sinful. I’m not sure this is resolved, but the question is most interestingly complicated by Atwood’s discussion of sin eaters, with Christ’s martyrdom embodying one grandiose redemption of the huge Original Sin debt. It takes time, but by the final chapter this does all slowly bring us to the fraught idea of forgiving debts, of social justice, and of one of the most troubling conundrums of the globalized economy. Atwood wastes few words on the issue, directing our attention to the “shadow side” of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, whose money-lending practices have fostered such abominable overspending by irresponsible leaders, leaving their desperate citizens with a bill they have no hope of being able to pay off. In the end Atwood actually says very little about the big issues we expect, mostly because the conclusions to be drawn from her study are so self-evident.

But many readers will still feel let down by Atwood’s parting tale, that new, corporate Scrooge taken on a magical mystery tour by the Spirits of Earth Day Past, Present and Future. Seriously, Earth Day. The frustrating part of this little revamp on Dickens isn’t that Atwood goes all hippy-dippy on us—her sense of humour remains firmly intact when dryly describing Scrooge’s coveting of hemp suits—but that her only prescription for resolving our economic-ecological crisis lies in dreams of sweeping, rather idealistic social change. The cynicism can be read quite easily between the lines, and our hopes of leveling our massive collective debts are left in danger of feeling all the more in vain. I guess it depends on how you read the last lines, as challenge or resignation: How do I even begin to pay back what I owe? Where should I start?

The Poet Hangs On: Margaret Atwood's The Door

It is very difficult to disassociate Margaret Atwood from Canada, at least for Canadians. Her distinctive voice—low, wry, at times a parody of liturgical, never burdened with excess inflection, though sometimes burdened by an excess of irony—functions as a sort of collective conscience, a running commentary on our nebulous sensibility. For those Canadians who still consider the role of writers in our cultural life important, those for whom literary conceits possess meaning beyond the invented worlds for which they were devised, Atwood has ascended to assume the role of our national Oracle.

Atwood turns 68 this month. It has been more than a decade since her last collection of poetry appeared, a decade in which she seems to have fully cemented her stature as a novelist of the highest order. When you read her new poetry collection The Door (McClelland & Stewart, $22.99), you’re inevitably led to question the significance of poetry in an era so seemingly disinterested in it, in the life of a writer who these days has become so famous for doing other kinds of writing, a prolific yet scrupulous writer who has arguably reached an age when writers start getting more particular about how they plan to spend the rest of their career.

Poetry, alternately rendered as something both fragile and immense, is the overt subject of several poems in The Door. In “The Poets Hang On,” Atwood considers the obsolescence of poets, virtual panhandlers who “have that irritating look / of those who know more than we do,” yet have “forgotten how to tell us / how sublime we are.” In the opening lines of “Possible Activities” she regards literary habit with the tone of one annoyed by another who “could sit on your chair and pick over language / as if it were a bowl of peas.” In “Poetry Reading” she endures a poetic performance long enough to finally surrender to it, allowing herself to be moved while recognizing that “there’s a cold craft to it, as with beadwork / or gutting a mackerel.”

These pieces, to say the least, don’t take their relevance for granted. The poems about poetry set the others in relief, engaging a process through which the reader can see this diverse collection as cohesive, a clear, unhurried train of thought, of artistic and even moral logic rivers its way through. We see the “point” of this activity, and don’t need to ask ourselves why the talented Ms Atwood isn’t doing “more important things.” Poetry in The Door, not unlike the prose work in Atwood’s recent volume The Tent, is facilitating a dialogue between Atwood’s most personal reflections and her reflections on her country and the world and the tumult in which they collaborate. Yes, the tone overall slips from the wistfulness of memories fading, to the playful otherness of animals and children, to mortality, apocalypse and, slightly more optimistically, the mystery of our collective future.

The strikingly morbid poem “War Photo” makes a nice appendix to Susan Sontag’s final book Regarding the Pain of Others, finding beauty and solace and finally saying a kind of prayer for a nameless dead victim of some atrocity. I especially liked the unambiguously themed “Weather.” Like “Dutiful,” “Weather” tries to figure out how guilty one should feel about issues clearly greater than any individual action. Climate change is conveyed with awe and alienation, with unease toward our culpability in the climate’s new layer of threat to human life. Weather is “blind and deaf and stupendous,” Atwood writes, “and has no mind of its own ... 

       Or does it? What if it does? 

       Suppose you were to pray to it, 

      what would you say?”

I don’t know if it’s because I always hear Atwood’s actual voice when I read her poetry, but hers strikes me always as a voice of authority. (Even when that voice comes across as too arch, which it rarely does here.) In “The Poet Has Come Back ...” Atwood implies that the poet’s authority can be maintained so long as the poet remains outsider and outlaw. In “Another Visit to the Oracle” this authority is summoned up in humorous and tremendous language that surveys the most frightful blind corners of modern life and carves out some role for the writer in it, ending with a summation that’s memorably piercing and unafraid to take up the torch of the great seer.

      “I’ll tell your story – 

      your story that was once so graceful 

      but now it is dark. 

      That’s what I do: 

      I tell dark stories 

      before and after they come true.”